When Webb and I exchanged emails yesterday, he didn’t want to share much about what happened and why. But a few months earlier, we had spoken at length on creative consultancies and the market for the Internet of Things, offering some hints at Berg’s precariousness in the design ecosystem.

Design consultancies can be a tough business. Much of Berg’s work since opening in 2005 was confidential because companies like their own names on their projects. Years of work for one of their biggest clients–Intel–was never realized or publicized (likely the case for its other mega client, Google). When we spoke a few months back for a story on Berg’s burgeoning cloud business, Webb lamented the one-way street of Berg’s inventions–that what they created was so rarely aired to the public. As design consultancy, you need to be able to advertise your creations to get more consulting jobs and keep your staff paid. “Revenue is 2.6 times payroll. That’s what a consultancy is,” Webb said then. “If you go on holiday for two weeks, you stop making money.”

Berg also fired clients. The company wanted to focus on itself, not as a design consultancy or even a product company, but as an infrastructure service company like Amazon’s cloud services. The Berg Cloud–invented to support the Little Printer–was repositioned as the digital backend for the long-teased Internet of Things, when all of our dumb objects are connected to the internet, and generate monthly subscription revenue that would add a stability to Berg’s ever-scrapping design consultancy business model. “It would be nice to fall asleep at night and know something is humming in the background,” Webb said then.

When we spoke over email yesterday, Webb didn’t have any particular insights or lessons about running a design consultancy to share. “Tbh I’m a bit close to it for a retrospective–still processing,” he writes. “Best way I can say it is that we didn’t reach the sustainable business thing.”

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In the coming months, Webb will lead a skeleton crew to either prepare the cult favorite product, the Little Printer, to be sold to a company or repackaged as an open source product. “Don’t want it to die, I want to remain proud of Little Printer and what happens next,” he writes. “So that’ll keep me busy for a bit.”